


and if we should die tonight, then we should all die together.

by Catherss



Series: Original Fiction [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Death, Gen, Orphans, alien cultures, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-10
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2018-02-16 22:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2286351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catherss/pseuds/Catherss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They stood, and watched their world burn from the window of the window of the SS Hopeful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and if we should die tonight, then we should all die together.

" _This is the way the world ends,_  
 _Not with a bang but a whimper._ ”  
\- T.S Elliot

They stood, and watched their world burn from the window of the window of the SS Hopeful.

It burned, crashed, crumbled, and they thought of the millions of lives below, of the brothers and the sisters and the parents and the friends. When they blinked,the memory of the inferno was imprinted onto their eyelids and it burnt, though the fires from below had transferred into their minds and ate its way to their hearts, searing it.

They could not look away.

There was a sort of beauty about the fires, of the magma spilling out from the crust of their world, of the millions of lights going out. There was a beauty in the destruction, and neither boy saw it through eyes blurred with tears. 

All one boy saw was their parents, holding them as he nursed a skid-burned hand, his siblings, laughing at the stupid joke he made, the goddamn dumb - _faithful_ \- dog that slept by his bedside every night since he was five, and the beacon of hope that was slowly being engulfed by the flames, the memory of his grinning friends being wiped away, being replaced by the image of them screaming, their mouths open in agony as flames swallowed them, and it made him feel sick, his core shaken and his head too full of firefirefirefirerunfire for him to consider anything else.

One boy saw only the flame, and his mind was blank, numb - he could not think. His mind was on fire, and frozen to its core with only a cold numb left behind, filling the gap with too many thoughts and non at the exact same time.

His head was full of nothingness, the void.

The boy next to him suddenly reached out a hand to the window, and pressed his fingertips to the glass. If there had been another hand there, it would have been a symbol of love, of good will. A farewell, a “see you soon, hey?”.

But there was no other hand there, and a single tear fell from the boys eye. He lowered his head, his black hair hiding his face, then let his arm fall slack against his side.

The boy watched on, then turned his head to the glass, and closed his eyes for what felt like should be the last time - how could he cope with this? The pain, the nothingness, the absence?

He didn’t want to cope with it. He wanted to fall, head first onto the planet being engulfed below and wondered why the gods would allow he, of all the boys in his now nonexistent homeworld, to live when so many better people lived below.

 

He wanted to feel no longer. He wanted to never hurt again.

Alas, the gods to not obey man’s laws, his mother had told him, and so the world burned through the glass and the SS Hopeful stayed motionless above it.

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely inspired by Star Trek (2009). Title from I See Fire by Ed Sheeran. Thanks for reading!


End file.
